Clone Yourself · Part 3 — your fence · the card every Flash Mission runs on
Free · Printable
The Fence Card
The two-second call on what's safe to paste into an AI tool — on one page. It wasn't a tool problem. It was a paste problem. Tape this where you work and the gut check becomes a reflex.
How to use it: before any paste, find what you're holding in the three rows below. When it's not obvious, run the four questions. That's the whole system.
First, which tool are you in?
Your company's approved tool, and the material stays inside: no scrubbing needed.
A free public tool, or anything you might show on a screen or in a chat: use material that's already fine to share, or scrub it first.
Board, legal, HR, a bid you haven't signed: not in a public tool at all. Not even to summarize it.
The three rows
🟢 Green — feed it freely
Yours, with no personal details in it.
Published posts · your own drafts · plans and ideas with no names · anything already public
🟡 Amber — redact first, then feed
Useful, but it's carrying names or details that the task doesn't need.
Meeting transcripts · emails with real names · customer stories → swap details for [NAME], [ORDER], [AMOUNT], add them back yourself after
🔴 Red — never. No tool, any tool.
Not yours to share, or dangerous anywhere but your side of the fence.
Passwords & keys · anyone's health or financial details · client files and contracts · other people's identifiers
Not sure? The 4-question gate
It's mine (or my company's) to share — not a client's, not a third party's.
No names, contacts, health, financial, or login details in it.
I'd be OK if this showed up in a search result someday.
The tool doesn't train on my inputs (or I've turned that off).
Four checks = feed it. A miss on the personal-details box = redact first. More than one miss = leave it out.
Redact by default. Feed on purpose.
The Big Four — what always gets scrubbed
If you wouldn't print the note on a highway billboard with your company's logo on it, it doesn't go into a public AI tool as-is. These four categories are the ones people miss in a hurry.
People
Client or customer names
Employee names or IDs
Personal email addresses
Phone numbers, home addresses
Money
Exact revenue or margins
Salaries and pay
Pricing terms and discounts
Bank or account numbers
Your edge
Unreleased product names
Strategic plans and roadmaps
Proprietary code
Trade secrets, patent work
Keys to the building
Passwords and passkeys
API keys and tokens
Internal server addresses
How the database is built
Scrub in four moves
The tool needs the shape of your problem, not the substance. Give it the shape.
1
Draft locally. Write or paste the note into a plain text editor first. Never type the first draft straight into the chat box.
2
Use brackets. Swap every Big Four detail for a placeholder. Email [CLIENT_A] offering a [PERCENTAGE] discount on the [QUARTER] contract.
3
Generate. Paste the bracketed version into the tool and run your prompt.
4
Reassemble. Copy the result back into your editor. Swap the real names and numbers in yourself, before it goes anywhere.
Before the first paste, onceFind the setting that controls whether your chats train the model. Every tool names it differently, and the name moves. Turn it off. Then check it again after any big update.
The red lineOnce it's pasted, it's pasted — there's no unsend on the way in. The fix always happens before the button. If you lead a team, this card is their fence too: print two.
This is the fence your whole AI practice sits inside — every Flash Mission opens by running it on real material. More free companions: My Voice Card, the Shape Map Card, the Weekly Ritual checklist, the Drift Check Card, and the Status Skeleton. The full workshops live in the Library.
A person always makes the final call.
Acute Incite · powered by theCommons Academy · Clone Yourself · Part 3 · The Fence Card (free printable)
